


i will follow you, anywhere

by butbythegrace



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Fix-It of Sorts, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Mind Reading, OC Character Death, RoyEd Week 2018, Separation, conqueror of shamballa, if you liked CoS this should be right up your alley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:00:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15749412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butbythegrace/pseuds/butbythegrace
Summary: It turns out memories aren’t the only thing Noah can see and watching isn’t the only thing she can do.For RoyEd Week 2018, "Together/Apart"





	1. lost boy, dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> Fic and chapters named for Lostboycrow's "[Traveler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uz77sDm8yw)".  
> (yes I added a word shh)
> 
> “[In My Head](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5U-8nqJ7vs)” by Solstis.  
> (extra feels)
> 
> [pf](https://www.pillowfort.io/butbythegrace) | [tw](https://twitter.com/butbythegrace1)

The Roma aren’t treated fairly.

Noah’s people are no worse than all the others in this world, and especially not the people of Germany supporting the man who looks upon certain religion, skin, and disability with a level of poisonous disdain that only evil could summon.

But just because Ed sympathizes – and with his prosthetic limbs, nearly empathizes – with their plight, it doesn’t mean he believes in their craft.

But they’ve lived together for a month now and Noah says she believes him.

She admits to touching him in his sleep and says she’s seen his memories, his dreams. She tells him things of home only he would know, about the boy in armor he would die for and a pair of dark eyes watching him with love, and it tugs painfully on the sutures of his poorly mended heart.

Ed should feel violated and angry. But it’s such a relief amid Alfons’ humoring smiles that someone knows. _Someone_ believes him. He wants to fall into that comfort in search of a moment of peace, to tell her about his brother and his lover and how he would do anything, _anything_ just to hear that they survived, but the cynic in him won’t let that happen. He’s already lowered his walls too much, letting his father in only to watch him disappear again, blurring the lines between his brother and Alfons to the point that he knows their farewell, in whatever form it comes in, will sting.

So instead of telling her more of his home, Ed asks what Noah sees in Alfons.

Her face falls. “The body is not strong enough for the soul to show me,” is all she has to say.

Ed knows his friend is sick despite Alfons's attempts to hide it. But a different wave of anxiety settles on his shoulders. He wonders, as he does every hour of every day, if his little brother is even alive, or if the gate had the last laugh and his sacrifice meant absolutely nothing. It’s impossible to know if Alfons’ illness is connected to Al in any shape or form. After all, Ed has seen so many faces in this world that no longer exist in his own.

He also wonders, in all the possible universes and all of their outcomes, if the alters of he and his brother are ever able to live in peace.

 

 

One morning Ed wakes but doesn’t get up right away. Instead he lays in bed and listens to Alfons and Noah in the next room, discussing dreams.

Alfons laughs about a recurring one he’d had for years, of himself as a knight in armor and a companion with a long blond braid and a red coat, undertaking some sort of quest. His amused tone sobers, softens. His dreams have been much quieter since the first World War. Now they’re filled with a warm yellow house and lonely travel with the same red coat worn on his own shoulders. They’re punctuated by a strange sort of incompleteness that never seems to leave him, even while awake.

Ed’s heart beats heavy and painful, reverberating through his bones and making him curl in on himself. How foolish and sad is he to hope something so unscientific could be true? But he can barely stand not knowing, so desperately missing his brother, his lover, his _home_. He swallows and swallows against the lump in his throat and tells himself to breathe. He’s found that if he lets the darkness hit him in the morning, he’ll never leave the bed.

“Ed thinks we might be a dream,” he hears Alfons say, voice wistful. “But I swear he’s from one himself.”

Ed waits until Alfons leaves to emerge from his room. Noah watches him knowingly as he pours his coffee and joins her at the table. He knows he probably looks like shit, like someone who just spent twenty minutes trying not to drench his pillows in eye water, but she mercifully doesn’t mention it.

She does ask if he’s ever had any strange dreams, where he was himself, but he wasn’t, or saw himself, but not _really_ himself, but Ed’s throat is still so tight he can’t speak. He can only offer a shake of his head, even though it’s a lie, even though he had _lived_ in his alter’s body and through the nightmare of his death. If his dreams hadn’t been so full of the horror and guilt of his own childhood creation then maybe he would have seen the life of this Ed, too.

Noah talks about a girl, very much like herself but a little younger, who never really had a place to call home, either. Horrific things had happened to her. There was a baby, and an inability to speak or run away. She rarely dreams of her now, but when she does, it’s peaceful, in a place she longs to call home.

Ed finds enough of his voice to ask if the girl’s name is Rose.

Noah smiles, unguarded, and shrugs. “I’m not sure. She wouldn’t tell me.”

Ed doesn’t dare ask what she means. He doesn’t know if his heart could handle it.

 

 

Noah asks about the man who loves him, if he’s always been short of sight and so hollow inside, and Ed doesn’t want to believe her anymore.

He’s pissed. It isn’t right of her, it isn’t _fair_ to do this to him, to pretend she has any idea what Roy is doing on the other side of the gate, to act like she can even _comprehend_ how big of a hole Ed probably left in his heart. He doesn’t just feel mad, he’s sick with it, and grief, and guilt, because if it weren’t for him, absolutely _none_ of this would be happening.

He grabs his coat and moves to leave, to run and hide like he always does when Alfons reminds him too much of Al in the morning light or when he realizes Officer Hughes could die at any moment from the same gunshot wound. But as soon as his hand touches the door handle, Noah’s voice pulls his panicking brain back from the brink.

“He calls you ‘darling’ and he knows you only pretend to be angry.”

Ed freezes. His heart is thundering and his skin is prickling and he just wants to leave, to be literally anywhere else, but a something in him keeps his feet from moving.

Noah's approaching steps are tentative, as if she's afraid she'll spook him and send him out the door, but her voice doesn't waver.

“He loves to braid your hair. He would forget the tie on purpose, just to have an excuse to do it again.”

The memories are as soothing as they are sorrowful, the pressure of the ache leaving his eyes burning and heart on the verge of cracking. He can't hear her walking anymore but he feels her watching him, a tranquil presence that doesn't do much to help ease his grief.

“And he loved you long before he ever told you. He regrets saving it for your last goodbye.”

Ed thinks it’s his grip on the door handle making his body shake, but when his vision blurs he realizes it’s actually himself struggling to breathe. He has to let go to wipe his eyes, to cover his face, to allow himself one anguished sob. But it's not nearly enough and instead comes out as a scream that sends his right fist slamming into the door. Four years ago it would have splintered under his touch. Now it barely makes a dent and mocks just how weak he feels inside. His knees want to buckle and take him to the floor so the tears don’t have such a long way to fall.

How could she _know?_ If his memories are all she can see, how does she know these things in Roy’s thought, in his voice?

Ed supposes she could be making careful deductions from his own memories. But he’s found Noah only does things with purpose, and with nothing obvious to gain from unearthing his heartache, he wonders what that purpose is.

Her hand is gentle on his elbow. She asks him to trust her. And with the pieces of himself pinging brokenly in a vial where his heart should be, he decides he has nothing to lose.

 

 

They’re at the park on a chilly spring morning when Noah introduces him to Roy Amsel and Ed isn’t sure whether to scream in her face or cry at her feet, because it hurts, it hurts so _badly_ , maybe nearly as badly as seeing the face of his brother on a stranger, but he wasn’t sure he would ever find Roy in this world and it’s also like breathing for the first time in years.

And the worst part is Amsel looks at Ed just the same as Ed looks at him and oh _god_ , Ed knows before the man even says anything. The plan had been to walk but they have to sit right there on the benches because neither of them has the will to move now. He and Amsel settle side by side while Noah takes a respectful distance at the far end of the bench next to theirs.

Amsel tells Ed about his alter. Edward Auer was born and raised in Germany with his adoptive parents. He was a post-graduate medical student and Amsel had been his chemistry professor, which is how they met. Auer had a needle-sharp outer layer that had taken months to navigate, but underneath was the most frighteningly intelligent and fiercely loyal soul Amsel had ever known. They hadn't loved long, and not nearly enough, but Amsel felt like he'd been waiting for Auer's eyes all his life.

Amsel’s smile dissipates, and Ed knows what comes next.

“He was visiting someone he knew in London,” he says, pressing his palm to his forehead. This Roy wears white gloves, too. “They found his body at one of the Zeppelin crash sites.”

Auer's hands were pressed together as if he were praying. But he had never prayed a day in his life.

Ed wants to throw up. He knows sorry isn’t good enough. But he says it, over and over and over as his hands crawl into his bangs and clutch at them so hard he knows it hurts, but he can’t feel it because the pain of knowing it was he who took Auer from this world is so much worse.

Amsel doesn’t blame him. Just slips an arm around Ed’s shoulders and tells him he knows Ed was ripped away just as suddenly from his own world and that he never would have knowingly made the choice for any of this to happen.

With Amsel’s arm around him, the wool of his coat scratchy on Ed's cheek as they both shake with their grief, it briefly flashes through Ed's mind that he could have something like what he’d had. He could get to know this man and his world and maybe learn to love him just as he’d loved Mustang.

His heart screams for him to try. _Please_ try. If this is all you can have, _make it be enough_.

But he knows it just isn’t possible.

Because this Roy never saw him when he was just hours outside of having his limbs ripped off and offering his heart to save his brother. This Roy didn’t give him a fighting chance to repent for his sin or yank him back to his feet after Nina’s death. This Roy doesn’t have thousands of demons staring at him from the fire or a mind that matches Ed’s own or hesitant hands and lips that touched and taught him so carefully it nearly made him weep.

As if reading his mind Amsel says just the same, because even though Ed also looks near identical to his alter, he isn’t him, either. They can’t soothe their souls with overly familiar faces and their lovers cannot be replaced.

But he does want to help Ed find his way home. Amsel knows how much it hurts to lose him, and not just through the pain of his own loss. His dreams haven’t been peaceful for years. He feels as if he has lost twice and it’s eating him alive, it’s going to _kill_ him if something can’t be done. The gun in his bedside drawer had been on his mind the morning Noah had approached him on the street. But he can’t let his death be meaningless.

“If I can give our alters a chance for the ending we could never have,” he says, eyes distant and very sad, “I will offer my heart, my soul, my life. I will do whatever it takes."

Ed should be more concerned about these admissions. He sees so much of Mustang in this man - the depression, the will to take his own life - that it makes his heart sick with fear.

But at the same time, even though his scientific soul is stamping and screaming and and trying its best to tell him he can't do this, that even if he's right he's still nothing but a selfish idiot using this man's heartache for his own gain, his heart still leaps.

Alphonse and Mustang are alive. And somehow, some way, Ed will help figure out how to tell them he is, too.

 

 

It turns out what Noah has planned is not so serious as life or death. It’s just Amsel sleeping while she touches both him and Ed. But it’s also not so simple. She can’t guarantee that this will even work, let alone that Mustang will talk to them. Twice she had connected to Rose, and twice she was met with upset so strong it caused them to almost immediately disengage. She warns Ed to be ready to convince Mustang to stay. But what they're attempting is beyond the language of science, and he's terrified nothing he has to offer will be enough.

Many things outside of their power and knowledge have to align to make a connection happen. And for weeks, and then months, they don’t.

If Alfons notices how many nights he and Noah are gone, he doesn’t say anything. His skin is growing paler, the blood he coughs up redder. He definitely doesn’t notice how much Ed sleeps in because he sleeps even longer now.

 

 


	2. comet, leaving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poem not by me, though it seems to not have a known author. If one can be pinned down, please let me know and I will be glad to credit them.

He slowly becomes aware of the room around him. It’s round, wood from floor to walls to ceiling, lit by a single dim light hung over the small table he’s seated at. There are no windows, not even a door. He swears he can feel the rough wood grain under his fingertips and smell basil in the air.

Where _is_ he?

The last thing he remembers is stoking the fire and crawling into bed. But he isn’t in his bed clothes, he’s in his uniform. He’s also without his hat or coat and it’s absolutely absurd that he would go anywhere this far north without them.

Anxiety coils in his belly because it’s possible he’s been taken hostage by Drachma and brought to this place.

But it’s strange. Though he doesn’t remember a thing, he doesn’t feel drugged, and he isn’t tied up. He isn’t tired or hungry or cold either, feelings that had become permanent upon taking his current post years ago. It isn’t listed under his real name so by all appearances he’s just a dime a dozen corporal who would be of no use to them. Even on the off chance he was recognized, would they really risk holding the former Flame Alchemist unbound in a wooden room?

It must be a dream, but that isn’t enough to settle him. It feels too real.

A voice tells him they don’t have much time and he nearly leaps from his skin when a young woman is suddenly seated across the table from him. With her long brown hair and dark skin she reminds Roy of an older version of the girl found beneath the church with Alphonse. She looks exhausted.

“He is alive,” she says.

Roy starts to ask who she means, but she takes his hands and he feels them, smooth and small and warm- and he _sees_ , golden eyes and a brilliant smile, blond hair pulled back but not braided, two fake limbs that aren’t automail but they’re where they should be-

Oh god, _no_. No. He can’t do this again.

He yanks his hands away and pushes his chair back with the screech of wood on wood.

“Please listen,” she pleads, reaching a hand out to him as if she’s afraid of letting him get too far away. “Please don’t go-”

He bows his head and grips the edges of the chair. “You’re just a dream,” he tells her.

“He wants you to know he loves you-”

Roy buries his face in his hands and his shoulders shake as he tries not to sob because he _knows_ this, it’s just his own mind playing these things at him and it _hurts_ , it hurts, it hurts. It hurts as badly as the dreams where he identified Ed’s body and attended his funeral, and the ones still where he lays in a strange bed and, with both eyes, cries over his death. It’s getting to be too much for him to handle. He wants to wake from this and never dream again because if they’re just going to keep reminding him Ed is gone instead of giving him one more second of his presence, even just a _moment_ of peace, then they aren’t even worth having.

“Please just leave me alone,” he cries, voice muffled by his palms that then crawl up into his hair, “let me wake up, I _can’t_ -”

He’s fallen in before and woken up drowning, staring down the gun on his bedside table. He doesn’t think there’s a thing she can say to convince him otherwise, to keep him here.

But he’s wrong.

“He wants to know if you ever opened the book.”

The gears of his mind don’t so much as grind to a halt but simply cease to move. Everything quiets, from the panic in his gut to the ache in his chest. He didn’t care for the book then and he shouldn’t now, the mention of it shouldn’t do this to him. It should hurt just as everything else that reminds him Ed is gone.

But it isn’t pain he feels. It’s intrigue.

He slowly raises his head to meet her eyes. She’s waiting, hand still outstretched and shaking.

The book had been all Ed left him when they parted for the last time, carefully kept safe that night by Riza and returned to Roy once he was conscious enough. But with a cracked red cover titled “Beginner’s Alchemy”, it had seemed more at home with a ten-year-old boy than a resigned state alchemist who could no longer bear the sight of his own array.

“I gave it to his brother,” he tells her.

The girl continues to look at him but not really _at_ him, as if she’s in her own little world. He wonders how many she has.

She blinks and her eyes soften, seeming to see him again. “He says you are – forgive me – an idiot.” 

It’s such an appropriate Ed response that Roy’s heart lurches. He opens his mouth to ask her just what the hell is happening here, but her eyes lose their focus again.

“Page 318,” she says before he can speak.

The question dies on his tongue. His hopeless heart could just be feeding this to him, attempting to ease his desperation and despair in its own cruel way, leaving him to wake up more abandoned and alone than ever.

But he hasn’t thought about that book once in the four years that have passed since it left his possession. Not when he’d heard Alphonse left for alchemy training, not when the boy wrote or called or visited. Never. He has no idea what lay within its pages or how many there even are, and the number 318 means absolutely nothing to him.

“If I may say something, Colonel-” the girl starts, drawing him back from the internal conflict he must be doing a shit job at hiding.

“It’s Corporal,” he corrects, wary though she uses the title Ed would remember him by. “But please. Roy is fine.”

“Roy,” she says with a faint smile. “I can see you’re struggling to trust me – _this_ – but please. Consider your dreams. Recurring, of yourself but not of this life.” She settles her elbows on the table, head cocked to the side as she studies him. “Because it seems – as this exchange proves to me now – that they are not dreams at all.”

Roy knows just the ones she means. The ones that slip through the cracks of his nightmares with their plainer, grayer world, that unfamiliar bed, test tubes and classrooms. Ed but not Ed, himself but not quite. And if they aren’t dreams, then what _are_ they?

Roy is torn between what he wants – to believe the impossible – and survival, because if he gives in and this isn’t real, he’s done. He can’t _stand_ it anymore. And what are the chances? Dreams can be anything, can skew reality as much as they wish. There’s nothing here that proves this is anything but fuel being taken from his own brain.

But.

But he knows Alphonse has experienced something similar. He’s mentioned dreams of himself, but older, paler in complexion and color, building rockets with the hope of sending someone home. Al is so sure Ed is alive, and Roy wonders if this – or something like it – is why.

He treads carefully in both his words and optimism, prey approaching a predator. “They’re- memories from another life?”

She hesitates just the same, perhaps still concerned he’s a flight risk, before nodding. “From someone you could have been.”

“In a parallel world?”

“Something like it, yes.”

That thought settles oddly in him. It’s all so far beyond everything he believes in, climbing into the clouds of things he cannot see or measure and he’s a scientist, he isn’t meant to believe in anything like this-

But he has witnessed horrific impossibilities in his lifetime. Has vaporized hundreds of thousands of people with a few snaps of his fingers. Has held Ed at night while he whispered about the Gate, the creatures inside and their vine-like hands that held him still while so much information was poured into his head he thought he was going to die from it. He has seen what the brothers’ transmutation created, has fought one of those homunculi and won by means that made as much sense as the monsters’ existence.

When Ed had given his life for Al’s, he had been taken into the Gate. So is it really so difficult to believe that a gate could lead to somewhere else? A place where this sort of connection is possible? A place where Ed is _alive?_

Roy’s body jolts, lurches him to the edge of his seat so his hands can splay across the table. He has so many questions – who she is, what is happening, _how_ \- but the most important one is, “Where is he?”

Relief takes her body and her shoulders sag at his acceptance. “With me here, a world away, it seems.”

“Can- can he ever come _home?”_ Roy asks, voice wavering. He can _feel_ how tight his throat is and how his eyes sting, and even though he’s spent entire nights in a strange bed mourning Ed’s loss, he has never once felt it until waking.

“He is desperately trying to find a way,” she tells him.

“Will I be able to see you again?”

She looks so damn morose that he knows the answer before she shakes her head. “It’s taken us months to make this contact and we are all exhausted. I’m not even sure how much longer I can keep us here.”

She must be the only thing keeping them together because he can feel what she means, the connection loosening, the edges going fuzzy, and _no_ \- he doesn’t want to go, he just got here, he wishes he hadn’t wasted precious time doubting her presence and purpose because there’s so much he has to say-

“Please- please tell him-” 

She leans over the table and grabs his face in her hands. He doesn’t fight her, is halfway out of his seat to meet her as she presses their foreheads together, god, she should have done this to begin with because suddenly he can _hear_. Crying, a voice, oh it’s _his_ voice, it’s _Ed,_ babbling for Noah – that must be her - to, "please tell him I miss him, tell him I love him, tell him to tell Al-"

"Edward,” he breathes.

" _Roy-_ " His voice is deeper but still him, still Ed, still with the ability to make Roy’s blood sing and pull comfort from the depths of his depression. It washes over his body like a flood of static, goosebumps rippling over his skin in its wake. Noah has to steady his suddenly precarious balance. Her hands don’t feel warm anymore.

Roy’s eye wells with tears. "Ed-" he chokes.

"I love you, I love you,” Ed sobs. “Don't regret a thing because I always knew you did-"

The tears are slipping through Roy’s lashes, dripping onto the hand balancing him on the table top. "I love you too, always-"

"I _know_ Roy. I do. Tell Al I love him, tell him to not waste his life on mine-"

Roy nearly laughs at that but doesn’t want to risk jarring and disturbing the delicate connection they cling to. The edges of him are fraying cotton fluff and he lifts a hand to cover one of Noah’s, hoping it may help keep them anchored. "I'll try but he's just as stubborn as you, if not an order of magnitude worse."

"The same goes for you. Please. It's enough to know you're alive."

Noah is shaking and Roy thinks she may be crying too, but he doesn’t want to open his eye in fear that adding another sensory element will hasten their departure. He’s starting to feel lighter, fainter, further away. He desperately doesn’t want to go. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye the first time, and it only made him less willing to do it again.

“My love,” he says, trying to quell his panic, not wanting the last words he leaves with Ed to be anything less than the definition of what Ed means to him. “I can't keep that promise.”

It doesn’t so much feel like falling as it does like fading, and he submits to it, breathes into it, doesn’t waste his energy fighting it but instead fueling just a few more moments of that connection. He takes in the sound of Ed’s breathing and remembers all of the times he has heard it, in his office, in his home, in the dark of night with their bodies pressed together and his own is confused by the lack of Ed’s presence.

“I will never be at home without you.”

 

 

It doesn't matter that he wakes slowly instead of the usual sickening feeling of falling that startles him back to consciousness. It still leaves him exhausted and disoriented, cheek wet with tears and chest a notch too tight. He buries his face in his pillow, breathing quick and shallow, wondering how much force it would take to smother himself. He had held back for Ed but now he wants to _scream_. He wasn’t ready for it to end, to let go, to-

Roy lifts his head with a jerk.

What had- what had just happened? Was it real?

It has to be.

He rolls out of bed, scrambles for the phone and dials for the operator, who he assures yes, of course this is urgent, and waits impatiently for the call to be patched.

He tells Alphonse his brother is alive, and with a laughing and patient tone that makes Roy believe Al has always been aware of more than he’s let on, he says, “I know.”

Roy doesn’t dare ask Al to check. He has to see it for himself, has to know that it was real, and Al doesn’t question his request.

The book arrives two weeks later. Alphonse, the brat, has wrapped it in four separate layers, presumably to keep it safe during transport, but one entire layer is tape. It takes some effort but Roy still tears through it all as if his life depends on it. And at this point, it does. It really, really does.

The book is still nestled within the remains of its packaging when he opens it, not knowing what he’ll find and terrified it will be nothing. He goes too far forward then too far back then too far forward again, his hands shaking and fingers slipping, before he finally makes it to page 318.

His heart stills.

It seems Alphonse, indeed, is very much aware of more than he's let on.

Roy sits down right there on the bed, cradling the book like a baby, and gently removes the memory from within its pages.

It’s a picture from years previous, at a get together they’d had in celebration of Hawkeye buying a house with a yard for Black Hayate. They had gathered in said yard on a cool summer evening with food and drinks and music. Havoc and Breda proceeded to get wasted while Hawkeye watched them disapprovingly and Falman her sympathetically. Fuery and Sheska twittered about electronics, Al visited with Gracia and Elysia, all while Gracia’s wayward husband worked to capture moments of every possible person and thing.

Ed had been wearing his hair down and Roy couldn’t help brushing it behind his ear when he’d thought no one was looking. He should have known that wherever Maes was concerned, there was always someone looking.

Roy swallows against the lump in his throat.

Ed’s eyes are bright and his cheeks flushed as he looks up at Roy, who was smiling as he said something. He remembered.

“How is it you outshine the sun?” he whispers now, tracing over the glossy photo where his fingers had touched Ed’s hair.

Maes had captured Ed’s blush and sweet smile but not the growled, “You’d better not call me your darling or I’ll kick you with the steel leg.”

How jealous Roy is of this past self for not appreciating enough that moment and all of the others that had come before and after. He’s not sure what compels him to flip the picture, but he does, and with that his heart is damn near wrenched from his chest.

It’s Ed’s handwriting, but neater, as if he had put time and care into making it beautiful.

no thing of this world

could keep us apart

because this is not my world

you are.

He closes his eye and has to tilt his head back to keep the tears from staining the picture and the home it has quietly kept for the past four years. His heart aches like the darkness surrounding Ed’s absence and he can’t help but feel that they aren’t going to find the ending they seek.

But Ed is trying, fighting tooth and nail and bone to find his way. And if dreams can transcend worlds, he knows Ed will find a way to do the same.

 

 

The years since his departure have turned Ed into something so gorgeously ethereal Roy can barely breathe when he sees him. They stare at each other over a few-inch gap and he may as well still be another world away.

When Ed tells him to take Al and go, and Al is every emotion Roy feels but holds inside, clarity clicks.

This is not his world, because his world is not a place, either.

And when he gets the chance to follow them – follow _Ed_ \- at the cost of everything and everyone he knows, he takes it. And he doesn’t look back.

 

 


	3. traveler, traveling

Ed’s theory is that two alters cannot exist in the same world.

Roy, who has heard the story of Edward Auer, who can’t unsee the body of Alfons or the face of himself in an obituary, thinks he may be correct.

They visit Auer first. Roy remembers him in fleeting moments, his taller stature and shorter hair, and somehow knows that he was even pricklier than Edward, who stands before the grave with the thousand-yard stare. He doesn’t say a word. Al has to help him place his flowers, and with gentle words and even gentler hands, Roy manages to coax him away. He can’t blame him. He can’t imagine having been there when Amsel pulled the trigger. He's not yet sure if his dreams going quiet is a blessing of peace or a curse that will haunt him with what the silence means.

Roy keeps a safe distance from Amsel’s funeral to prevent upset, but is careful to not stray too far either, because he is able to see his parents for the first time since he was nine years old. And knowing the same parents disapproved of Amsel’s relationship, Edward stays back, too.

Roy is sparing with his time spent at Alfons’s graveside. Ed assures him this Maes and Roy weren’t friends but the thought offers him little comfort. He did not know Alfons beyond the young man’s sacrifice, and anything more than seeing Maes’ face and catching a whisper of his voice just may bring Roy to his knees. To glimpse him just once more is enough. So he leaves a single white rose and a moment of his silence, a single thank you though not even one million would be near enough, and retreats to observe the remainder of the service from atop a low stone wall.

As he watches Noah dance – and how strange it still is to see her in the flesh – Amsel’s graveside service disperses. Roy and the brothers were planning on visiting his grave after, together, but the burial attendants haven’t lowered the casket yet and Roy can’t help but succumb to the overwhelming urge to pay his respects now.

He slips off the wall and allows it to carry his feet across the cemetery, steps slowing as he approaches and comes to a rest in front of the casket. He runs a gloved hand over the polished wood, his chest tight as he considers this man, who had been so much like himself, who had loved his own Edward just as fiercely and felt his loss just the same, and who had given everything to ensure that, in some form, he and Ed were able to be together.

He’s tired of his heart hurting but it can’t be helped. He’s _alive_. It could have been him in a casket, it _would_ have been him, if not for this man.  

He doesn’t have much to offer. It’s all he really has left from his world, but it was through Amsel’s connection that he was able to find it in the first place. Roy reaches into his pocket, producing the photo from page 318, and tucks it into the assortment of flowers spilling over the casket sides. He has never been one to believe in the afterlife. But following everything he has gone through, Roy has decided that it isn’t his place to make such a declaration, and he hopes that no thing of the world that comes after could keep Amsel and Auer apart, either.

He leans forward, pressing his forehead to the casket. “Thank you,” he whispers, voice catching as he threads his fingers into the blanket of flowers. “Thank you.”

 

 

They leave that day.

Noah catches a ride for them on a wagon, where the Amestrian trio grins sheepishly under the glare of Scar and the sultry smile of the woman Lust may have been. They settle together at the back, nothing but the clothes on their backs and a single suitcase. Roy wonders if they will ever find a place to settle, but for now they have a purpose. This is their home now, with three people having given their lives for them to be here, and they will put those gifts to good use.

Noah gives them space, seated some feet away, watching the countryside roll by. She's very intuitive, which Roy supposes comes with her sort of ability. They are all good and well exhausted and it's nice to be within their own circle, if only for just awhile. They've seen and said goodbye to too many familiar faces today.

This doesn't stop Ed and Al from tentatively planning their next move, even though Roy knows it's just to distract themselves. They speak of finding and destroying the uranium bomb. Roy remembers sending Ed on that mission, and how reckless he’d been.

“You blew up the castle,” he muses.

“Before confirming we had a reliable mode of escape,” Al grouches. “I don’t even think it was a boat we salvaged, it was a piece of leaky tank. _And_ he stole my head to scoop water out it.”

The looks on the faces of the other passengers are priceless. Roy isn’t sure whether to be amused or nervous at the idea of so openly sharing their stories of home, but surely he can get used to the odd, confused glances and learn to laugh, as Ed would probably be doing now if he wasn’t bristling in defense.

“What’d you want me to do, huh?” he snaps. “Neither of us could swim.”

“Planning ahead for once in your life would be nice.”

“Something can be said for acting on a whim,” Roy interjects with a smile, and both brothers go quiet at that.

They ride in a comfortable silence, for so long Roy thinks the topic has been forgotten and left to float away. And perhaps it has been by Alphonse, whose actions during their last moment in Amestris will never be questioned, by either himself or Ed. He had given up his world to follow the only family he had left and the person who had given their life for him.

But up until very recently Ed had thought of Roy as the head of a team, a dream, a purpose. It was still strange for him to consider Roy had only left behind memories, disappointed comrades who would miss him but were fine without him, and a frozen outpost he would have wasted the rest of his life maintaining.

So when Ed inevitably, quietly asks him if he regrets his split-second decision to leave the only world he’s ever known, Roy does not hesitate in his answer.

“My love,” he says softly, brushing Ed's bangs behind his ear and cupping his face. Ed's eyes bore into his, radiant gold that thaws and thrills his soul, that still offer him every emotion right on their surface. “I will follow you, anywhere.”

Ed doesn’t threaten him with the steel leg, but he does blush and look away. Al still observes his brother and Roy with the subtle excitement of someone who has been waiting ages to see them together. He looks back and forth between them with a grin slowly spreading across his face, until Roy is grinning right there with him and Ed is fighting his own and failing. He buries his red face in his hands but Al won’t have it, he nudges his brother with an elbow until Ed catches him in a headlock and ruffles the hell out of his newly shorn hair. Their laughs are as warm as the sunshine on Roy’s skin.

It’s for this that he would make the same decision, a thousand times and then some, because for the first time in years - in a place that had seemed so dull through another's eyes – does he feel so, so alive.

 

 


End file.
